The world renowned linguist and political scholar says the current state of US-Russia relations could lead to nuclear war.

Photo Credit: Kelly Maeshiro/Creative Commons

November 7, 2014 |

World renowned linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky said in an interview with the Russian-based RT that the current state of American-Russian relations could lead to a nuclear confrontation.

“It’s come ominously close several times in the past, dramatically close,” he said. “It could happen again, but not planned, but just by the accidental interactions that take place — that has almost happened.”

“It’s worth remembering that just one century ago, the First World War broke out through a series of such accidental interchanges. The First World War was horrifying enough, but the current reenactment of it means the end of the human race.”

“There have been many cases,” Chomsky continued, “not that serious, but pretty close, where human intervention with a few-minutes choice has prevented a nuclear war. You can’t guarantee that’s going to continue. It may not be a high probability each time, but when you play a game like that, with low probability risks of disaster over and over again, you’re going to lose.”

“And now, especially in the crisis over Ukraine, and so-called missile-defense systems near the borders of Russia, it’s a threatening situation.”

He was then asked about Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s remarks on the Ukraine, in which he said that the United States needs to deal with “Russia’s army [being] on NATO’s doorstep.”

“The official justification for NATO,” Chomsky replied, “was that its purpose was to defend Western Europe from Russian hordes who might attack Western Europe. Can’t ask how plausible that explanation was, but that at least that was the official explanation. Well, 1990-1991 — no Russian hordes. Natural conclusion: ‘Let’s disband NATO.’”

“But,” he continued, “the opposite happened — NATO expanded. Its mission changed. The official mission of NATO became to control the international, the global energy system, pipelines.”

As for the future of US-Russian relations, Chomsky said that America will continue “what it’s doing — driving Russia towards the East, towards closer relations with China.”

“There’s plenty of hostility way back between China and Russia, but there are also some common interests, and the sanctions and other pressure against Russia are almost compelling Russia to move towards closer relations with China. China is the center of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a very substantial international system based on China, which includes India, includes Russia, includes Pakistan, includes the Central Asian States — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and others — it’s a big international system.”

While politicians are now talking about changes to police training, increased use of cameras on police and other reforms and the Department of Justice is taking action, protests must continue and be sustained in order to achieve the necessary changes . For example, sustained protests are planned at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC every Monday (https://www.popularresistance.org/sustained-protests-begin-at-us-justice-department-december-1/) at 4:00 pm. We must be uncompromising in our consistent demand for justice.

Demand Justice: End Poverty Wages

Another issue that is increasing its people power and political strength is the reality of millions of US workers receiving poverty wages. In the last two weeks there were two national days of action by people seeking living wages. Economic injustice has deep roots but now it is beginning to be addressed.

Two years ago 200 fast food workers in New York City walked off their jobs. This has also grown into a national movement. This Thursday in more than 190 cities people walked off their jobs and protested (https://www.popularresistance.org/fast-food-workers-strike-in-190-cities/) for a $15 an hour living wage and union rights. The movement has not only grown geographically but also now includes more categories of workers. This year, baggage handlers, skycaps, wheelchair attendants and aircraft cleaners from 10 major airports supported the strikers as the Fight for $15 movement.

And, in two years of organizing, 8 million low-wage workers have seen raises. The lesson from this experience is that organized people can build power and create change.

Intensify and Spread the Struggle Against Police Murder and the New Jim Crow -- Get Organized and Go Higher!

Sunday, December 7, 3pm

West Park Presbyterian Church

165 W 86th St, New York, NY 10024

at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, enter on 86th

The actions of the people the last week have achieved a great deal. These actions have forced everyone in this country to confront the reality of this epidemic of police brutality and murder, of mass incarceration, of the criminalization of entire peoples.

Now is certainly not the time to retreat or quiet down. Now is not the time to fall for the honeyed words and empty promises of the oppressors, nor to be misled by their slanders. Now is the time to intensify and to spread this movement and the righteous actions taken so far. Still more people must be involved--there are plenty of people who have not come out in struggle yet, who must and should and can be won to come out. And these actions themselves must become more determined in confronting the business-as-usual of this empire. Organizing through Twitter and Facebook has its definite strengths, but people also need to get together in person and decide how to take this higher.

The US House of Representatives’ resolution passed Tuesday declares not only war against Russia, but a war for Kiev against Donetsk and Lugansk, Daniel McAdams, executive director at the Ron Paul Institute, told RT.

Vladimir Putin is “isolating Russia completely internationally,”claimed US President Barack Obama on Wednesday. He also said that he is “not optimistic that Putin will suddenly change his mind-set… which is part of the reason why we're going to continue to maintain that pressure.” The House of Representatives is discussing a resolution that condemns Russian actions in Ukraine. The motion describes Russia as “an authoritarian regime,” and calls for the reinforcement of NATO and the sale of US natural gas to Europe so they don’t need to buy energy from Russia.

RT:Do you think this resolution will be adopted?

Daniel McAdams: I think it will overwhelmingly be voted on. As a matter of fact it was debated [Wednesday] afternoon and the vote was delayed probably until tomorrow morning. I expect an overwhelming positive vote on this legislation.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images/AFP

RT:Former US Congressman Dennis Kucinich criticized the resolution saying it’s a “throwback to the Cold War era.” Is this a justified concern?

DM: I spent nearly 12 years on Capitol Hill working for a member of House Foreign Affairs Committee and I know exactly how these resolutions are drafted. It was not drafted by the member of Congress who is credited with it, Mr. Kinzinger of Illinois. These are drafted by special interests, they are handed to the members of Congress who are favored, who behave themselves in the committee and they get the glory of introducing a bill. The US media has been pushing this propaganda against Russia’s Putin for months and months. So Congress feels it has to do something to remain relevant and catch up with the people. But these resolutions are all put together and written by special interests and members feel they can’t vote “no” on them. You can say no on the one hand because it is just a resolution and has no force of law. But if you read the bill it is almost comical and that everything that it accuses Russia of doing the US and the US government in particularly has been doing certainly since last year. And one of the big complaints of the bill is how mean it is that Russia is putting forth “anti-American propaganda,” when this is exactly what Congress has been doing for the last year, it is almost comical. It accuses Russia of holding fraudulent elections which are pretty serious charges. Several occasions in the bill it mentions chapter five of the NATO Treaty which requires all NATO members to come to the military assistance of others, Ukraine is not a member of NATO. I don’t know if Congress understands what that means.

RT:This sort of rhetoric and these kinds of resolutions keep going forward to Congress and so forth, how are they going to jeopardize the relations that Russia and the US have? And what about the timing of these resolutions?

DM: It is interesting that you see; just when the South Stream pipeline that was supposed to start going through Bulgaria was called off this week - the US probably views that as a great victory. When the Europeans are paying 30 percent more for their fuel they may have a different view of it. But the timing is absolutely right. And this is a green light for the Poroshenko government to resume military actions against the “separatists” in Eastern Ukraine. If you read the resolution very, very early on, it encourages him to retake this territory. So it is not only a declaration of a US Cold War against Russia but it is a declaration of war for Kiev against Donetsk and Lugansk.

THE ETHICS OF CLIMATE HOPE: A RESPONSE TO ELIZABETH KOLBERT

December 2, 2014 by Naomi Klein

Note: This letter will be published in the next issue of the New York Review of Books, as well as a response by Kolbert. The letter is followed here by a short additional note and update, addressing Kolbert’s reply.

To the Editors:

According to Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of my book, This Changes Everything,humans are too selfish to respond effectively to the climate crisis. “Here’s my inconvenient truth,” she writes, “when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car.”

Kolbert’s only proof for this sweeping judgment is her partial account of a single Swiss research project that began in 1998. The researchers behind the 2,000-Watt Society, as the project is known, determined that if humans are to live within ecological limits, then every person on earth will need to keep their energy consumption below 2,000 watts. They created several fictional characters representing different lifestyles to illustrate what that would entail and, according to Kolbert, “Only ‘Alice,’ a resident of a retirement home who had no TV or personal computer and occasionally took the train to visit her children, met the target.”

From this Kolbert concludes that my argument—that responding to climate change could be the catalyst for a positive social and economic transformation—is a “maddeningly” optimistic “fable.” Fortunately, Kolbert’s grim conclusions are based on several mischaracterizations of the most current research on emissions reduction, as well as of the contents of my book.

Let’s start with the Swiss project. It is indeed difficult to reach a 2,000-watt target while living in a society that systematically encourages wasteful energy use (through long daily commutes, for instance) and when energy is overwhelmingly derived from fossil fuels. But that’s precisely why we need the kind of bold energy transformations described in my book and already underway in some countries: there is no need to accept the outdated fossil-fueled infrastructure that we have now, let alone what we had in 1998.

Big investments in renewables and efficiency, as well as re-imagining how we live and work, can deliver a low-carbon, high quality of life to everyone on this planet. And as I write on page 101, “In 2009, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucchi, a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, authored a groundbreaking, detailed road map for ‘how 100 percent of the world’s energy, for all purposes, could be supplied by wind, water and solar resources, by as early as 2030.” Today, low-emission living is considered so achievable that the city of Zurich has adopted the 2,000 Watt Society as an official government target, a piece of good news Kolbert chose not to share.

To make sure I wasn’t missing something, I ran Kolbert’s invocation of the Swiss study by one of the world’s leading experts on radical emissions reduction, Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the U.K.’s Tyndall Centre on Climate Change Research. He was also baffled by the reliance on such out of date assumptions. “Arguably back in 1998 there may have been some merit in the sole focus on energy consumption as an adequate proxy for emissions—as the prospect of large-scale low carbon alternatives was still a long way off—both technically and in terms of economics. Sixteen or so years later and many of the alternatives are now sufficiently mature to compete with fossil fuels.” In short, the world has moved on.

It is true that it will take time to roll out the infrastructure and technologies to get off fossil fuels, and we will burn a lot of fossil fuel in the process. As a result, those of us who consume a great deal now will need to consume less in order to drive emissions down. In the book, I explain that, “we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s.” The majority of the world’s population, however, would be able to consume more than they do at the moment.

Kolbert’s review makes the quite extraordinary claim that my book “avoids looking at all closely at what [emission reduction] would entail.” In fact the book contains an in-depth discussion of emission reduction strategies employed by large economies like Germany and Ontario. It dissects the policies that work and those that do not and explores how international trade policy needs to change to make such policies more effective. It delves into which agricultural practices carry the most climate benefits, goes into detail about how to pay for green transitions (from luxury taxes to public control over energy grids). It calls for a revolution in public transit and high-speed rail, for shorter workweeks and serious climate financing so that developing nations can leapfrog over fossil fuels. It also calls for moratoriums on particularly high risk forms of extraction—and much, much more.

I know Kolbert didn’t miss all of this because that would have meant missing hundreds of pages of text. It seems she would prefer me to have written a book focused on individual consumer behavior: how much people can drive and turn on their TVs. Yet there have been dozens of books that reduce the climate challenge to a question of individual consumer choices. My book is about the huge public policy shifts needed to make those low carbon choices far easier and accessible to all. It is therefore, a book first and foremost about ideology, and the need for a dramatic move away from the dominant free-market logic that has made so many of these necessary policies seem politically impossible.

This part of my thesis has been well understood by a great many reviewers, yet strangely ideology was not even mentioned by Kolbert. Her bleak conclusion, however, is confirmation of precisely why no real solutions have a chance unless this ideology is challenged. Right now we have an economic system that encourages and relies on selfishness and rampant consumption. Unless we change, well, everything, many of us can be counted on to cling to our HDTVs as the screens flash ever more apocalyptic images of a world in collapse. It may be wild optimism, but I insist on believing that humanity can do better.

Naomi Klein

After submitting this letter, someone pointed me to a review Kolbert wrote several years ago of a very different kind of climate change book, No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. Beavan’s book could scarcely be more different from This Changes Everything. Indeed No Impact Man does exactly what Kolbert criticizes me for notdoing: it spells out in minute detail exactly what comfortable, middle-class Americans would have to give up in order to dramatically lower their emissions. And yet in her long New Yorker review, Kolbert mocks Beavan quite mercilessly for turning his life into a low-carbon P.R. “stunt,” taking shots at several other writers focused on personal carbon consumption along the way (Beavan’s response is here).

But with hindsight, the most striking part of Kolbert’s piece on Beavan is her conclusion about the kind of book she would preferred to have read: “The real work of ‘saving the world’ goes way beyond the sorts of action that ‘No Impact Man’ is all about,” she writes. “What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: ‘Impact Man.'”

Kolbert, in other words, wanted Beavan to write a book about movement building and big policy shifts—a little like the book that I actually wrote. Which makes it particularly strange that she now longs for me to write a book a lot more like Beavan’s.

Or maybe there is something else going on here. Kolbert’s review contained a couple of digs at my lack of earlier engagement with climate change. Including this painfully revealing line: “Back in 1998, which is to say more than a decade before Klein became interested in climate change…” (This was the set up for her invocation of the Swiss study.) So… yes, Kolbert has been writing about climate change longer than I have. And it’s quite true that, back in 1998, I was writing a book about consumption and corporate power, not climate change specifically. But does this kind of petty turf-protection really have a place in the face of a collective crisis of such magnitude? Personally, I much prefer the spirit of the slogan of New York City’s People’s Climate March: “To Change Everything, We Need Everyone.”

Writing this response has not been fun. I have long admired Elizabeth Kolbert’s vivid reporting from the front lines of ecological collapse and the climate movement unquestionably owes her a debt of gratitude. Which is why I find it particularly troubling that someone so intimately aware of the stakes in this struggle would devote so much intellectual energy to describing why change of the scale we need is a “fable.” Why should hope—even deeply qualified hope like mine—be maddening?

I have yet to meet anyone professionally focused on the science of our warming planet who does not wrestle with despair, myself included. Yet surely the decision about whether to maintain some hope in the face of an existential crisis that is still technically preventable is not just a matter of cold calculation. It’s also a question of ethics. If there is any chance of turning the tide, and if taking action could actually lead to all kinds of ancillary benefits, then it seems to me that those of us with public platforms have a responsibility to share that good news, alongside all the painful truths.

At the very least, we should refrain from digging up fictionalized residents of Swiss nursing homes to make responding to the climate crisis seem infinitely more grim and punishing than it actually is.

Despair in the face of difficult odds is understandable. It is also highly contagious.

UPDATE: The New York Review of Books has just posted my letter, followed by a response from Elizabeth Kolbert. You can read that here. Sadly, much of Kolbert’s response is based on a complete misreading of my letter. As readers can clearly see, I did not criticize the 2,000-Watt Society itself, but rather the way she misrepresented the project in her very partial treatment of it in the review, cherry picking results and using them to support a message of despair. (I was quite clear about this, objecting to Kolbert’s “partial account” of the project and her “mischaracterizations of the most current research”—if my problem was with the project, I would not have hesitated to say so. As for the implication that I can’t even master Wikipedia, oh my…)

Kolbert has written in more depth about the 2,000-Watt Society elsewhere, but in her review of my book, she completely fails to mention that it envisions a robust, rapid transition to renewable energy, one that is looking more feasible every year. That leaves readers unfamiliar with the project (and that would be most readers) to conclude that reducing individual consumption is the primary lever we have, and, moreover, that the researchers are calling for us all to live like elderly Swiss shut-ins. It’s a selective account that supports a message of political hopelessness, when the laudable goal of the project is precisely the opposite.

Obviously, I’m well aware that the project does not paint such a bleak future—as I state, the city of Zurich has officially embraced the goal of a 2,000-Watt Society, and Swiss researchers are not the only ones who have concluded that drastically expanding efficiency and renewables *in tandem with* reduced consumption can deliver a very high quality of life. Of course politicians are not doing nearly enough get us there, which is why my book argues that success depends on social movements.

Finally, my observation in the book about returning to a 1970s lifestyle was not a specific analysis of per capita US energy consumption. The point was a much broader one—namely, that a big part of radical emissions reduction is cracking down on the out of control consumption of the super-rich. As Dr. Kevin Anderson explains here, returning as soon as possible to the lower emissions levels of the 1960s and 1970s would impact the wealthiest most of all, and there is no reason to doubt that as long as we are focused on equity, industrialized countries could make those reductions while maintaining a perfectly acceptable quality of life.

Keep a close eye on what savings you have left. The financial honchos have plans for your money.

Ellen Brown, who writes at The Web of Debt is the only blogger that I am aware of who writes about the neoliberal machinations related to preparing for the next giant bank crashes. In a recent post she describes the latest plan adopted by the G20 nations. I believe this is crucial information for many and so wish to broadcast it further, including some background not covered in her post.

Since the financial crisis of 2008 central bankers and regulators have been busy drawing up plans for avoiding the next bank melt-down. Here in the US, banks considered by the government Too Big To Fail (TBTF) were bailed out six years ago with our tax money on the arguable rationale that if they were permitted to fail, they would take the entire economy down with them. The crisis led to a loud outcry from taxpayers and many savvy experts. They called for a breakup of TBTF banks as the most effective way to avoid future failures and the economic turmoil they engender.

It is no secret that the financial contingent of the Economic Royalists are in the driver's seat worldwide. We need no more explanation than that to understand why the big banks, like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, were not broken up, contrary to the public interest. In fact, they are far larger today than they were in 2008, making the TBTF threat worse than ever.

So what plan have the geniuses come up with that both pacifies taxpayers and still saves the TBTF banks? You will be appalled. First, though, some explanation is in order. It is a little known fact that when we put money into a savings account at a bank it is no longer our money. Essentially we have loaned the money to the bank in return for an IOU and some paltry interest. In finance these deposits are referred to as unsecured debt. Theoretically. deposit accounts are insured by the FDIC for up to $250,000. The wrinkle is that the amount of money in the FDIC insurance fund is approximately $25 billion, while the total of deposits at US commercial banks is approximately $9,300 billion, yes that's $9.3 trillion The failure of just one mega-bank would easily wipe out that fund. Since the FDIC would be unable to keep failing huge banks solvent an alternative is required.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) that now regulates banking globally began as a group of G7 finance ministers and central bank governors organized in a merely advisory capacity after the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. Although not official, its mandates effectively acquired the force of law after the 2008 crisis, when the G20 leaders were brought together to endorse its rules. This ritual now happens annually, with the G20 leaders rubberstamping rules aimed at maintaining the stability of the private banking system, usually at public expense.

At the G20 meeting last month in Australia, the FSB presented and received approval for their latest plan for conducting the "resolution proceeding", i.e. bankruptcy, for a troubled TBTF bank. Cutting to the chase, the pertinent part for my dear readers is that instead of their tax money going to bail out the banks, it will potentially be their bank deposit money! The FSB recommended that governments make statutory the confiscation of depositors' money (also known as unsecured debt) if the assets of the bank plus all secured debt is insufficient to keep them afloat. This has come to be known as a bail-in.

Further, the FSB has put our pension funds at risk as well. They require banks to hold a buffer of securities to be liquidated to prevent insolvency ahead of resorting to deposits. Among other instruments in these buffers are bonds in which pension funds are invested.

Let's suppose you have a good amount of cash in a Wells Fargo savings account. Furthermore, your pension fund is invested in bonds which WF owns in their emergency buffer account. The next financial crash occurs. The TBTF banks, now with greater risk exposure than ever, start tumbling. Heading for insolvency, bank regulators force WF to liquidate its assets and it's secured debt to raise cash. If that is insufficient the buffer securities will be sold off next. There goes a chunk of your pension fund's money. And if THAT is insufficient the regulators will go after the cash in large deposit accounts first, then, perhaps, get to yours.

The bottom line is, the government is preparing to legitimize the theft of our savings in order to prop up irresponsible and unscrupulous bankers. A far better solution, still, is to break up the TBTF banks proactively, thus avoiding the bankruptcies and the need to save the banks on the backs of the people.

It seems that everyone but Darren Wilson is responsible for the death of Michael Brown. It’s Michael Brown’s fault, black-on-black violence is at fault, it’s a culture of disrespect and lawbreaking that’s at fault, take your pick. Perhaps the best spew of logic came from Rudy Giuliani, who essentially said, if you black people didn’t kill yourselves so much we wouldn’t have to send so many white cops down there to kill you as well.

Yes, crime in black communities is bad. Yes, white police officers killing unarmed black people is bad. Are we not capable of holding two thoughts in our collective head at the same time? It sure seems that many people only talk of “black-on-black” crime when they are defending a white police officer.

Now that another tragedy has happened in the blink of an eye and the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death on camera was not indicted (who you gonna’ believe, your lyin’ eyes or the police union?), let’s hope the growing outrage continues to spotlight police brutality and brings an end to these all-too-frequent killings. Be sure to like, comment and share this cartoon far and wide, or check out links behind the cartoon on my site.

Now that the Missouri non-prosecutor has issued a sweeping non-indictment of Darren Wilson, we can finally find Michael Brown’s real killer!

Who Killed Michael Brown? It’s a real whodunit!

Was it the black-on-black crime in his neighborhood that forced Brown to tackle a police officer’s bullet with his head?

No? Well it must’ve been the Cigarillos that pushed him into a competent and level-headed police officer’s line of fire.

And if not the Cigarillos, it must’ve been his sheer size that killed him!

Weighing in at six-foot-four, two-hundred and ninety-two pounds, Brown terrified Officer Wilson, who was only six-foot-four, two-hundred and ten pounds, (plus the additional weight of the club, gun and police vehicle.)

Was the real killer . . . Hulk Hogan?

Had Officer Wilson not been so scared of the wrestling superstar, he would not have confused an unarmed teen with a world heavyweight wrestling champ in tights and a boa.